of the origin of religions in general, Spencer has made a fatal error in assuming that he is dealing in the Rig Veda with primitive religion, uncritical savages, and undeveloped minds.  And furthermore, as the poet of the Rig Veda is not primitive, or savage, or undeveloped, so when he worships Dyaus pitar [Greek:  Zeus pataer] as the ‘sky-father,’ he not only makes it evident to every reader that he really is worshipping the visible sky above; but in his descriptions of gods such as Indra, the Dawn, and some other new gods he invents from time to time, long after he has passed the savage, primitive, and undeveloped state, he makes it no less clear that he worships phenomena as they stand before him (rain, cloud, lightning, etc.), so that by analogy with what is apparent in the case of later divinities, one is led inevitably to predicate the same origin as theirs in the case of the older gods.

But it is unnecessary to spend time on this point.  It is impossible for any sober scholar to read the Rig Veda and believe that the Vedic poets are not worshipping natural phenomena; or that the phenomena so worshipped were not the original forms of these gods.  Whether at a more remote time there was ever a period when the pre-historic Hindu, or his pre-Indic ancestor, worshipped the Manes exclusively is another question, and one with which at present we have nothing to do.  The history of Hindu religions begins with the Rig Veda, and in this period the worship of Manes and that of natural phenomena were distinct, nor are there any indications that the latter was ever developed from the former.  It is not denied that the Hindus made gods of departed men.  They did this long after the Vedic period.  But there is no proof that all the Vedic gods, as claims Spencer, were the worshipped souls of the dead.  No argumentum a fero can show in a Vedic dawn-hymn anything other than a hymn to personified Dawn, or make it probable that this dawn was ever a mortal’s name.

In respect of that which precedes all tradition we, whose task is not to speculate in regard to primitive religious conceptions, but to give the history of one people’s religious progress, may be pardoned for expressing no opinion.  But without abandoning history (i.e., tradition) we would revert for a moment to the pre-Indian period and point out that Zarathustra’s rejection of the daevas which must be the same devas that are worshipped in India, proves that deva-worship is the immediate predecessor of the Hindu religion.  As far back as one can scrutinize the Aryan past he finds, as the earliest known objects of reverence, ‘sun’ and ‘sky,’ besides and beside the blessed Manes.  A word here regarding the priority of monotheism or of polytheism.  The tradition is in favor of the latter, while on a priori grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the Hindus only another illustration of one universal fact, and posit even Aryan polytheism as an advance on the religion which it is probable that the remoter ancestors of the Aryans once acknowledged.